Focusing on the reflection and analysis of the contemporary urban project, Actar produces award winning books which have impacted the social context of architectural research and practice for the past twenty years. Now entering an exciting new phase focused on the multi-platform development of specialized content through urbanNext, Actar is producing new tools for its global dissemination with new impulses, new proposals, and new goals to expand architecture to rethink cities.

Actar D also co-publishes and distributes worldwide books from eVolo and from renowned schools of architecture including Harvard Graduate School of Design; Yale School of Architecture; Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation; MIT School of Architecture + Planning; University of Virginia School of Architecture; Cornell University; and Rice University.

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Retrospecta is the annual journal of student work at the Yale School of Architecture. Part historical record, part monograph, Retrospecta seeks to capture and record the current life of the school. Documenting one academic year, each issue contains exemplary work from both the design studios and support courses. The daily activities of the school, including lectures, symposia, exhibitions, and studio reviews, are also highlighted through numerous candid photographs and quotations. The journal is edited by students and published by the school.

The book brings together a collection of essays that are an outgrowth of the eponymous symposium at Yale School of Architecture. It addresses issues relating to exhibiting architecture as formulated by architects, historians, and curators.The ambition of exhibiting architecture entails paradoxes: how to

The ambition of exhibiting architecture entails paradoxes: how to exhibit something as large and complex as a building or a city, and how to communicate something as elusive as an architectural experience that unfolds in space and time. To be sure, architecture poses a challenge to exhibition as a medium. What is it we exhibit when we exhibit architecture: should we be satisfied with photographs of buildings and sites or should we aim to display whole buildings or fragments and models of them? These were among the questions the organizers posed to the group of architectural and art historians, practicing architects, and curators who were invited to participate and contribute essays to the book. Their discussions address the exhibition as a medium and challenge the preconceived idea of what architecture is by examining a range of possibilities as to how architecture is made, experienced, and discussed.

Analytic Models in Architecture documents Yale School of Architecture student work from the undergraduate studio course “The Analytic Model: Descriptive and Interpretive Systems in Architecture,” taught by Emmanuel Petit from 2005 to 2014.

The projects are organized to a set of ten conceptual categories that emphasize varying strategies of formal analysis: Aggregation, Cinematics, Condensation, Diagrammatics, DNA, Fluid Interlocking, Fragmentation, Morphology, Seriality, and Thickened 2-D. Five critical essays focus on particular aspects of analysis in architecture: Anna Bokov about the Soviet avant-garde, Matthew Claudel about agency as the crucial qualifier, Kyle Dugdale draws an analogy to Homeric analysis, exposing the web of deceit that underlies the ostensibly dispassionate analytic exercise, John McMorrough asks what constitutes architectural analysis after close reading is over, and Emmanuel Petit reviews the different ideologies that concepts of analysis have occupied in architectural theory throughout modernity.

Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professorship

Tatiana Bilbao

This book is a compilation of the projects developed at the Yale School of Architecture in an advance studio called, Diversification: How to reintegrate abandoned social housing complexes in different areas of Mexico, led by the architect Tatiana Bilbao who was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor for a semester, and developed in conjunction with the INFONAVIT (Institute of the National Fund for Worker’s Housing).

In response to the aggravating abandonment rates in Mexican social housing complexes, the studio aimed to address this issue and simultaneously offer solutions to the actual housing deficit. The studio’s focal point was to understand the specific environmental conditions each of the chosen case study housing complexes, and to cast a proposal that could architecturally reintegrate these spaces and transform them into a positive detonator for its surroundings. The book features a general introduction of the problem and thematic of the studio, and a chapter for each of the projects: Monterrey, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara, and Cancún.

Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellowship 08

James Andrachuk, Nina Rappaport, and Andrew Benner

The Bass Fellowship at the Yale School of Architecture was led by Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization, a leading New York firm known for spearheading sustainable high-rise developments, architects Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Christoffersen of BIG, and Yale faculty member Andrew Benner. The studio explored potential synergies between public and private programs in the design of inhabited bridges crossing major waterways in New York City. The featured projects here demonstrate a diverse range of approaches for combining residential, cultural, and commercial activities on complex and dense infrastructural sites in imaginative and productive ways. The book includes interviews with the professors, an essay by Bjarke Ingels and the studio projects.

Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellowship 07

Rethinking Chongqing presents the work of a Edward P. Bass Studio at the Yale School of Architecture, co-taught by real estate developer Vincent Lo, founder and chairman of Shui-On Land, the Yale Bass Fellow, and Paul Katz, James von Klemperer, and Forth Bagley, managing principal, design principal, and senior associate, respectively, of the international architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.

The site of the studio project is the soon to be redeveloped site of the central rail terminal, a critical nexus of infrastructure located near the riverside that offers rich possibilities for re-thinking the relationship between transit, public space, and mixed-use program in the city. The studio investigated a diverse range of proposals for new scales, typologies, and program mixes play in shaping new paradigms for the development of western China’s emerging mega-cities.

The studio proposed designs for a world-class winery and hotel complex in Rioja, Spain where wineries are both vernacular and exuberant in design. The students were challenged to address social, economic, and environmental sustainability in a holistic and integrated way. The project resulted in a range of strategies to sustainably harvest, engage local workforce, integrate landscape, and source materials responsibly. The project features attractions and symbiotic food production to facilitate tourist visits. Edited by Henry Chan and Nina Rappaport the book is designed by MGMT

Escritos / Writings

Alberto T. Estévez

Special selection of Alberto T. Estévez writings, after 15 years since the creation of the Genetic Architectures Research Group and of the Biodigital Architecture Master, in ESARQ (UIC Barcelona), year 2000.

This book is about the interdisciplinary of Architecture, Design, Art, Science, Technology, Theory, Practice, Biology, Digital, Genetics… With writings about the application of genetics to architecture, about the first time that geneticists work for architects, towards frontiers of architecture, working with digital tools and organic forms, with the new bio & digital techniques in architecture and design…

Collected Short Stories on CODA’s Party Wall at MoMA PS1

Caroline O’Donnell and Steven Chodoriwsky

This Is Not A Wall is conceived as an epic of one architectural entity’s lifespan, depicted through a unique collection of illustrated short stories. The entity in question is the temporary pavilion Party Wall, designed by CODA as the winning entry of the 2013 Young Architects Program organized by MoMA PS1. This Is Not A Wall recounts Party Wall’s complete 9-month lifespan, from its initial nomination in November 2012, through its design-build process, to its dismantling at summer’s end in September 2013. The central intention of the collection is to chronicle Party Wall’s unique contextual environment, and elucidate upon its role as a mediator of complex relationships amid the individuals, institutions, and companies to which it owes its existence.
This Is Not A Wall also works to frame Party Wall in a larger contemporary discourse. Concerns include: architecture and its correlation to installation; experientiality and public performance; and a reconsideration of the sign in architecture as it pertains to legibility and meaning. Longer, essay-style stories by architectural journalist Cynthia Davidson, CODA principle Caroline O’Donnell, among others, will punctuate additional story pieces MoMA curator Pedro Gadanho, MAXXI director Pippo Ciorra, architect Peter Eisenman, previous YAP winner Matthias Hollwich, alongside project participants and other observers – from PS1 janitors, to local skateboarders, to construction volunteers. By stressing Party Wall’s creative process as a distinct product of its context, spatial-temporal constraints, and collected voices, the book is equal parts an analytical handbook of the competition and design process, an account of its evolving construction, and a poignant description of its lived experience.

Abstract is the yearly publication of work and research from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Produced through the Office of the Dean Amale Andraos, the archive of student work contains documentation of exceptional projects, selected by faculty at the conclusion of each semester.

The 2016 edition includes the applied research of the school’s laboratories and projects from design studios taught by Kunlé Adeyemi, Benjamin Aranda, Gro Bonesmo, Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, Frida Escobedo, Jeanne Gang, Juan Herreros, Andrés Jaque, Laura Kurgan, Jing Liu, LOT-EK, Kate Orff, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Thomas Phifer, Hilary Sample, Bernard Tschumi, and others. This encyclopedic volume is conceived as both an organizational model for the school and a testament to the global distribution of the work included within.